


Hold Me Like a Grudge

by TheWrongShop



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Existential Angst, Fluff, Gentleness, Hair Braiding, M/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Set in Episodes 159-160 | Scottish Safehouse Period (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:08:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26459968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongShop/pseuds/TheWrongShop
Summary: In the Scottish safehouse, Jon contemplates intimacy and monstrosity. One of these is more foreign to him than the other.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 16
Kudos: 188





	Hold Me Like a Grudge

**Author's Note:**

> I experienced a bit of writer's block in my other fic and it was 2am and one thing led to another. Enjoy this mostly soft and strangely hair-themed safehouse fluff. :)
> 
> (also, the title is from Weak by AJR, because their songs never fail to make me Feel Things)

Jon mostly avoided mirrors these days, if he could help it.

It was lucky there was only one mirror to avoid in the cottage, and luckier that Martin hadn’t objected or asked questions when Jon draped a sheet, yellow with age and bearing some spots he didn’t dare inspect too closely, over his reflection.

“I don’t much like mirrors myself,” he said agreeably. “Never did, but especially since… everything.”

He didn’t elaborate; he didn’t need to. Even without the Eye whispering assorted secrets in Jon's mind, it was fairly obvious to him what Martin was referring to. He wouldn’t have liked mirrors either if each time he looked, it was a gamble whether his reflection would make an appearance at all.

Morbid curiosity won out sometimes, though, and Jon, toothbrush poking out the side of his mouth or hands still wet from the sink, would pull just a corner of the sheet aside. The wave of relief that swept over him every time the image looking back at him was still human (or at least human-shaped) was almost debilitating. As soon as he had confirmation his eyes, in particular, were still their normal colour, size, amount, whatever other criteria he could figure, he would let the sheet fall back into place. Just because there wasn’t anything _wrong_ with his reflection didn’t mean he enjoyed looking at it.

The gleam of silver in his hair especially made him grit his teeth and look away. Silver was the color of flesh-eating worms, of corkscrews and the shiny buckles on Nikola’s circus ensemble. Threads of spider silk and wisps of fog. It was also the color that had let him give off an air of dignity and experience at the Institute, but where had that gotten him?

“I wonder if the general store in town has any hair dye,” he mused aloud over dinner one night. It was, in its own way, a desperate plea for humanity; he already knew perfectly well that the general store did, in fact, stock dye, but only in three colors, and there were two boxes of black on the shelf close enough to his own color that only Martin would register a difference, and that a woman named Lydia was currently inspecting a box of brown dye. A human would have no way to know that, though. A human would idly float this topic at the dinner table.

Martin looked rather startled. “Hair dye? What for?”

“Well,” Jon said, because the fact that he was probably less than fifty percent person hadn’t yet managed to stop him being a bit of an insufferable bastard. “There are really only so many things you can do with hair dye, Martin. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”

Martin rolled his eyes. “Okay, obviously, yes, I know what you do with hair dye, Jon.” He gave Jon a wistful glance, eyes resting somewhere in the vicinity of his forehead. “You’ve got such lovely hair, though.”

Jon couldn’t help a smile at the redness steadily blooming in patches on Martin’s face. They weren’t quite used to exchanging these easy intimacies yet, and he still found himself surprised at the open depth of the gazes Martin kept giving him. The warmth that pooled in the pit of his stomach was rather at odds with the familiar, clammy chill of unpleasant secrets.

“I look like an old man,” he said instead of bringing Prentiss or Peter back into the cottage. He didn’t bother to make the lie sound convincing.

“Maybe I like that,” Martin teased, but the smile he gave Jon was sad. The clinking of their forks on porcelain filled the quiet for a long moment, then Martin said, “Tell you what, I’ll take a look next time I run down there. You can come if you like, but I can probably guess your color pretty close.”

Jon knew, in that moment, that Martin would have taken Basira’s borrowed car all the way down to the next town over if necessary, even though he hated driving and hated odd, winding roads more. He wasn’t sure if this information was a helpful contribution from his patron or just a logical takeaway based on Martin’s devotion and intrinsic need to _help,_ and he didn’t bother trying to find out. He was feeling unusually human, and those moments were fleeting and not to be squandered.

* * *

Martin did wind up buying a box of dye, and Jon spent a solid hour crouched over the bathroom sink clutching the box just hard enough to bruise the sides, a steady monologue of ingredients and potential allergens scrolling through his mind like a demented ad disclaimer. He got as far as letting his hair straggle in a loose mass down his shoulders before, calmly, he straightened, tucked the box in the cabinet beneath the sink, and left the room. The mirror stayed covered.

“Oh, hello,” Martin said as Jon found him on the sofa. His voice was cheerful and gentle, but Jon tried not to let that affect him too much; after all, he had heard Martin take the same tone with grotesquely hairy spiders and puppies alike.

“Hello,” he replied evenly, and plunked himself down on the floor by the sofa where Martin lay with a book open on his chest. “Is, ah, this alright? You’re reading.”

Martin made an amused noise which Jon took to mean yes _._ He leaned his back against the cushion where Martin’s arm rested and allowed himself to drift for a while, anchored by the steady sound of Martin breathing and turning pages behind him.

Even here, miles and miles away from the things that had haunted them in the Institute, Jon couldn’t seem to purge his mind of all the horrors they had faced. He couldn’t even look back on happier times as a source of comfort; even the earliest, glowing memories of when the greatest threat he faced was workplace incompetence had been corrupted and mangled into something unrecognizable.

He couldn’t think of Tim’s oversaturated, megawatt demeanor without hearing the crackle of the tape around his voice, raising one last defiant middle finger to Jon and the world before encapsulating himself in a blaze of – glory didn’t feel like the right word, but Tim didn’t deserve anything less, so glory it was. He hadn’t wanted to find that tape. It had found him; he was certain that if anyone had scoured the site of the Unknowing after the fact, they wouldn’t have known or bothered to bring the relic of his friend's destruction to him.

As for Sasha, thoughts of her left a bitter tang on his tongue. The creature he remembered wasn’t his friend. He shied away from the face that wasn’t her face in memories and was horribly, guiltily grateful that she, at least, hadn’t had to witness his spiraling descent out of personhood.

Jonathan Sims had died, really, he contemplated numbly, tipping his head back against the sofa. He had gone into that coma and never come out, instead replaced by – he fought back a rush of bitter amusement at the thought he’d had about so many monsters before him – the entity formerly known as Jonathan Sims. What was the point in disguising any of the monstrous parts of himself? Martin already knew what he was, even if he wasn’t running just yet.

When a cautious weight landed on his scalp, the entity formerly known as Jonathan Sims jumped.

“Sorry,” Martin said, and withdrew his hand only far enough that Jon could still feel its presence hovering nearby. “Just – you still with me? You looked a million miles away.”

“I was,” Jon said, forcing himself back into his body and deliberately relaxing back against the cushions. He could feel the expectation in Martin’s silence, so he tacked on, “Thinking about… how everything used to be, I suppose.”

Martin’s hand wound its way slowly, cautiously into Jon’s hair as he made a sympathetic noise. Jon’s eyes drifted shut, and he focused his every muscle on not shuddering at the sensation of blunt nails on his scalp. He couldn’t help the shaky inhale that tore through his body, but at least he was able to keep that quiet. If he did anything at that moment that made Martin stop the firm circling motions of his hand, he wasn’t sure if he could have lived with himself.

Martin didn’t stop, and after what felt like an eternity Jon built up the courage to lean his head into Martin’s touch, into the fingers that scarcely even still held a trace of unnatural cold. He was rewarded with a second hand joining the first, deft fingers tangling in his hair and applying gliding pressure to his temples, the base of his neck, the spot just beneath the collar of his shirt where he’d sat hunched over in a horrible position long enough to create a persistent ache. The longer Martin worked, the warmer his hands became, and Jon selfishly allowed himself to believe that this was helpful to both of them, that he was driving the chill and leftover fog from Martin’s system simply by virtue of existing. It was so nice to pretend he could undo damage, for once, instead of causing it.

He drifted again, and this time his mind was perfectly, blissfully blank.

* * *

They were sitting in bed a few nights later when Martin reached out a hand to brush a loose strand of grey from Jon’s face and asked, so, so tentatively, “Can I braid your hair?”

Briefly, Jon found himself unable to breathe. There was a knot in his throat like threatening tears when he nodded and found his voice. “Now?”

“If you like,” Martin replied, like if he spoke too loudly Jon would evaporate. Maybe he was right; Jon could practically feel himself shaking apart on a molecular level.

Silently, Jon got up, retrieved a hairbrush from the bathroom, and hurried back into bed. The bathroom’s tiled floor was cold enough to almost burn the bare soles of his feet.

Martin smiled as he accepted the brush and a spare hair tie. “Turn around,” he instructed gently. Jon complied.

They had gone out for a long walk that day, and the wind had whipped his hair into all sorts of knots and tangles. Jon hid his winces as best he could when the brush snagged on these. Martin kept up a running commentary of murmured apologies throughout and rubbed a comforting hand over Jon’s shoulder whenever he hit a particularly bad one.

Then the worst of it was over. He could feel the bed shift as Martin set the brush aside, and he definitely felt it when broad hands dug into his hair again, unexpectedly enough that a shiver ripped through Jon’s frame before he had a chance to quell it. He barely had time to think _no no no_ before Martin withdrew, but only slightly, enough to peer around to Jon’s face and say, “Alright?”

“ _Yes,”_ Jon said quickly, breathlessly, his face doubtless expressing all sorts of emotions he didn’t even have names for. The heavy sigh he let out when Martin touched his hands to his head again was one of bone-aching relief. With an unfathomable tenderness and equal efficiency, his hair was collected into three segments, and the gentle tugging on his scalp as they were maneuvered into place was heavenly.

“You know,” Martin said cautiously to the back of Jon’s head, fingers deeply entwined in hair, “That you don’t have to keep the grey on my account, right? I- I like it, yeah, but that’s not what’s important.”

When Jon turned to look at him, Martin made a small dismayed sound as the braid was tugged out of shape. Jon didn’t care; he had to meet Martin’s eyes for this. “I know,” he said as earnestly as he could manage. “I know.”

“Okay.” Martin’s voice was quiet but steady. “Um, turn back around for me?”

“Thank you,” Jon said into the dark, grateful that his face wasn’t visible anymore. “Martin. Thank you.”

Jon preferred to sleep with his hair loose, but when Martin tied off the braid and swept a heavy palm over the back of Jon’s neck for good measure, it didn’t even occur to him to change it before lying down, tucking his face into the crook of Martin’s neck, and drifting off.

* * *

The next time it occurred to Jon that he could still use the hair dye, he was no longer concerned with hiding reminders of anything monstrous. A single glance outside would have rendered the exercise pointless and besides, he wasn’t sure if it would have worked in a world that thrived on horror. Even if he had wanted to try it, he couldn’t say he trusted the cabinets to contain household objects as regular as dye.

Likewise, the mirror stayed covered, even though there was no longer any doubt in Jon’s mind that if he looked into it a monster would look back.

**Author's Note:**

> By the way: Jon is always, always ace in my fics (of course) but I don't tend to tag for that unless it's directly mentioned or relevant. Also, I wrote this between 1 and 3am and barely edited it, so if anything in here makes you go "what in the world was she thinking", that's why.   
> Thanks for reading!! Have a nice day :)


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